Maybe the plan shown in the slide is undertake research that would distinguish between the Ptolemaic and Copernican hypotheses.

-- Edward Tufte

Response to Block That Metaphor! The NASA Space Exploration Map

Do I detect a graphic heritage from the 1991 NYC subway map?

If so, I think the fastest way from earth to mars, if starting on the Green train, is to transfer to the express Red train at Low Earth Orbit. If one just misses the Red train, then stay on the local Green train.

Most likely the graphic heritage here is from the Washington, DC metro map. Note how the junction indicators at Earth, LEO, and HEO/the Moon closely match the major junction indicators for the DC metro map (Metro Center, Rosslyn, etc). On the metro map they indicate places where you can switch lines.

On the NASA map, they indicate that someone in charge is equating a subway system with space travel. Scary.

The metro-map itself fails to tell anything substantive.
Viewing Earth in a gravity well, all rocket trips would
be "up", hence Venus, Mercury and the Sun would present
a more technical and payload challenge than Earth L1/L2.
There were 100's of LEO shots compared to Pioneers, etc.

A Napoleon's March, tracing the number of flights to
each end-point in our gravity well (logorithmically),
would be far more useful as a teaching tool graphic.
Throw in an elliptic super- of the solar system, with
an Audubon's illustration of the space birds, wha-lah!

But I'd like to see a Napoleon's March of the US:Soviet
Cold War nuclear weapons production:destruction cycles,
beginning in 1945 to the present. Underneath, a mirror-
graphic of US citizen treasure spent, and so destroyed!

It is often the case that metaphor somehow tarnishes the original - the
Hollywood version of Hopper's Nighthawks being an example. But here the
quality of Becks' work on the London Underground is pointed up by the
catastrophic failure of the NASA slide.